1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of computer networks, and in particular to a system and method that facilitates an analysis of the traffic patterns and performance of sites on a network.
2. Description of Related Art
Traffic analysis is a necessary tool for effective web-site management and on-going web-site development, as well as for the development of effective marketing strategies. Web-site managers, hereinafter webmasters, desire information that can be used to enhance the web-site's performance or appearance. Electronic-commerce marketing managers, hereinafter marketers, desire information that can be used to enhance the sales resulting from visits to a web-site, to enhance advertising revenue from the web-site, and/or to determine the effectiveness of advertising expenses to other web-site providers.
Tools are commonly available for collecting traffic data. A fundamental tool, for example, collects data regarding the number of times each page at a web site is accessed within a given period of time (e.g. ‘hit-rate’ statistics). A more sophisticated tool, such as the Netflame™ product from Fireclick, Inc., collects data regarding entries to and exits from each page at a web site. By tracking visitors' paths through the website, a Netflame™-enabled web-site can be configured to anticipate a next-page that a visitor is likely to visit, and can initiate a download of some or all of the anticipated next-page while the visitor is viewing the current page. In this manner, the performance of the web-site is significantly enhanced, because, from the visitor's perspective, the anticipated next-page appears to download instantaneously. Only if the visitor chooses an unanticipated next-page will the visitor experience the true download delay duration.
Copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/734,910, filed Dec. 11, 2000 and entitled “Predictive Pre-Download Using Normalized Network Object Identifiers”, discloses a preferred technique for determining and downloading the anticipated next-page. Of particular note, this copending application also discloses the concept of a “normalized” web-page, wherein alternative versions of a web-page are analyzed and processed as a single web-page. That is, alternative versions of a web-page may include an element that varies, depending upon the environment, the particular viewer, the class of viewer, a currently advertised special, and so on. Each version may potentially correspond to a different web-page, because each version may have a different URL (Uniform Resource Locator). If processed and analyzed separately, the individual statistics that are associated with each of the different versions of a web-page would generally be meaningless. A normalized web-page comprises all of the non-varying elements of the alternative versions, and the data collected corresponding to each of the alternative versions is associated with the normalized web-page. In this manner, statistics are provided for the web-page, independent of variables associated with the web-page. For ease of reference and understanding, the term web-page as used herein includes a normalized web-page, and other collections of pages, files, and data that form a cohesive entity for traffic-analysis reporting purposes. For example, copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/079,932, filed Feb. 19, 2002, entitled “Predictive Predownload of Templates with Delta Encoding,” discloses the use of “templates” that correspond to the relatively unchanging portions of a web-page, and “delta-encoding” to encode the portions of a web-page that change. As defined herein, the templates with multiple and varied delta-encodings correspond to a web-page. Other examples of collections of material forming a cohesive entity for traffic-analysis will be evident to one of ordinary skill in the art.
The information provided by traffic or path analysis tools is useful, but somewhat limited. While knowledge of how visitors typically arrive at a web site, which pages they typically visit while at the site, and where they go to when they depart the web site, is useful for determining the effectiveness of the site in satisfying marketing objectives, such as the effectiveness of a page layout for directing visitors to select targets, it is somewhat limited in providing insight as to where problems may lie.
Collecting information for a more detailed analysis, however, requires substantial memory resources, particularly for web-sites that are visited hundreds or thousands of times per hour. Even if one could initially afford the memory resources to collect a detailed record of each visit to a web-page, the amount of memory resources required can be expected to grow non-linearly as the analysis system provides the feedback that is expected to facilitate a substantial increase in the popularity of the web-site. Also, as the size of the database that contains the detailed information increases with time and/or site popularity, the time to access the information in the database will increase, thereby diminishing the analysis tool's effectiveness as an interactive query system.